Perhaps it isn’t too soon to begin the post-mortem of an epic failure — the automatic, un-prioritized federal budget cuts scheduled to take effect Friday. President Barack Obama served up a road map last week, and again Tuesday, as he continued his road show of sequestration horrors; he has sounded as perplexed as the Chemistry 101 student trying to explain how his experiment blew up the science lab.

“The whole design of these arbitrary cuts was to make them so unattractive and unappealing that Democrats and Republicans would actually get together and find a good compromise of sensible cuts as well as closing tax loopholes and so forth,” Obama said in a speech last week. “And so this was all designed to say we can’t do these bad cuts; let’s do something smarter. That was the whole point of this so-called sequester.”

As we now know, “let’s do something smarter” — well, that just isn’t something Washington does anymore. On Tuesday, Obama visited a Newport News, Va., shipyard to decry anew the ill effects of sequestration, mostly across-the-board cuts totaling $85 billion over the next seven months. They are the first installment in $1.2 trillion in “unattractive and unappealing” automatic cuts scheduled over the next 10 years, barring some accord.

The president told shipyard workers the sequester was a “dumb way to do things.” Doubtless there was no counter-argument; Obama warned the cuts could cost more than 10,000 jobs in Virginia alone.

New Yorkers will be hit hard as well, according to the White House, to the tune of $275 million in cuts impacting colleges and universities; needy children and seniors; students and educators; job seekers; public health; domestic-violence victims; crime prevention and prosecution; and clean water and environmental protection. Additionally, the Pentagon has said it will pare $351 million in spending statewide, including $92 million at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. These are self-inflicted wounds the recovering economy can ill afford.

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There was talk Tuesday of alternatives to this “dumb way to do things,” but there was mostly bluster. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the Senate should get “off their ass” and “do something.”

The Senate could consider alternatives Thursday — the day before the cuts begin — but neither the Democrats nor Republicans signaled a sharp retreat from their polar opposite positions, heightening prospects for failure.

A nation-damaging path

Stubborn to a fault, House Republicans have rejected the White House’s balanced approach to deficit reduction — measured cuts, coupled with new revenue from closing tax loopholes — the approach Obama won re-election on; Republicans have said “no” to any tax increases. Obama’s approach is smarter for an economy still in recovery, but his political gambit underestimated the economic damage the opposition was willing to inflict; he also can be faulted for not putting forth any alternative reasonably crafted to narrow the ideological gap. Now, once again, Washington needlessly races the clock.

The American people are not blameless in this. They have long since lost any sense of fiscal reality — an appreciation for the gap between the government they receive and the government they actually pay for with their taxes, short of borrowed dollars.

There needs to be some reckoning, some reconciliation, because the prevailing course is unsustainable; but that is no justification for this nation-damaging path.

“I don’t think the public realizes how stupid these cuts are,” Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said on “CBS This Morning.” He added: “Limping from one budget crisis to another doesn’t do anything for the economy.”